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  • Built in 1926 on Lot 324 in Tract 8230
  • Original commissioner: property developer and building contractor Whiting Thompson as a speculative project
  • Architect: Whiting Thompson
  • On May 18, 1926, the Department of Building and Safety issued Whiting Thompson permits for a two-story, nine-room house and a two-story, 20-by-26-foot garage at 232 South June Street
  • Advertisements for the completed 232 South June appeared in the Times during January 1927; 10 rooms were now being counted
  • Stockbroker Ralph Stanley Welch was the first owner of 232 South June Street, in residence by mid 1927. Born in Mediapolis, Iowa, on April 4, 1900, Welch was in business with his father James M. Welch. The senior Welch had bought 540 South Rossmore Avenue, another spec house, in 1925, not long after which the Welches and their firm, the James M. Welch & Company, became embroiled in the Julian Petroleum scandal; a lawsuit filed against them claimed that the Welches had accepted payment from the complainant for Julian stock that they had proceeded to take for their own use rather than offering shares to clients. According to the Los Angeles Times of October 30, 1925, the complainant demanded $104,833 in restitution. It appears that the Welches countersued and were exonerated. There may have been some reputational damage; while James Welch would hold on to 540 South Rossmore through the Depression before his house and its contents were auctioned off in 1937, Ralph Welch's domestic situation changed more immediately. He would not occupy 232 South June Street for long. By early 1930 he was living with his wife, née Laura Wiley, and two children in a 1925 bungalow way down at 8758 South Hobart Boulevard in a neighborhood far away and very different from Hancock Park 
  • Judge Albert Lee Stephens was the owner of 232 South June Street by early 1930, moving with his wife and two sons from 269 South Harvard Boulevard. Born in State Line City, Indiana, on January 25, 1874, Stephens had moved to Southern California when he was 10, the family settling first in Compton, where his father opened a hardware store. After working as a butcher-wagon driver, a gold-mine guard, and a bicycle salesman, he studied law after a friend gave him a law book to study; after passing oral examinations, he was admitted to the Los Angeles bar in 1899 before receiving his LL.B from U.S.C. in 1903. Stephens practiced in the city privately and with partners until he was a elected as a justice of the peace of Los Angeles County in November 1906. Spending that Christmas back east in Cincinnati, he married Marie Clarke on December 26. Miss Clarke had retained her surname after having been adopted by the Noah Pearley Boblett after the death of her mother when she was four; she had been visiting friends in California when she met her future husband. Stephens left the bench in January 1911 to return to practicing law. The Stephenses' son Albert Lee Jr. was born at home, 277 South Coronado Street, on February 19, 1913; Clarke Edwin arrived on Halloween of 1914. The family would have several addresses before moving to 232 South June Street
  • On July 2, 1930, the Department of Building and Safety issued Judge Albert Stephens a permit to make a 19-by-20-foot addition to the rear of the garage at 232 South June Street, per the document "making 4 car garage"
  • While the Depression would greatly slow its progress, Hancock Park by 1930 had established itself as the central Los Angeles suburb with the highest cachet, one to which, along with adjacent, established Windsor Square, old West Adams families gravitated. While Beverly Hills was well established by the mid 1920s and with Brentwood developing rapidly as well as Bel-Air (the latter a considerable cut above upper-middle-class Hancock Park), the Westside was in the pre-freeway city still a long way from the established business district downtown. For Angelenos moving from once-fashionable but denser neighborhoods to the east and south of Hancock Park, the fact that it was still connected to downtown by Los Angeles Railway streetcars plying Third Street as far west a La Brea Avenue had some emotional appeal to the Park's burghers, of which Judge Albert Lee Stephens was certainly one 
  • Judge Stephens was elected city attorney of Los Angeles in 1913, serving for six years. He was named to the Superior Court in 1920 by Governor William Stephens (no relation). In December 1932 he was appointed by Governor James Rolph as an associate justice of the Second District Court of Appeal, the next year becoming presiding justice. While vacationing with his family on Catalina in August of 1935, he heard the news that President Roosevelt had appointed him as a U.S. District Judge in the Southern District of California. In June 1937 the President elevated Stephens to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, though he appears to have commuted to the bench there from Los Angeles until moving north in 1956


The Stephens family as seen in the Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1959


  • Albert Lee Stephens Jr., having matriculated at U.S.C. and now an attorney, married Angeleno Barbara McNeil, a graduate of Los Angeles High and U.C.L.A., at Immanuel Presbyterian Church on September 20, 1939. The bride's twin sister Virginia was her maid-of-honor and Clarke Stephens his brother's best man. Clarke Stephens would also become an attorney after U.S.C.; as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve, he married Elizabeth Anne Allen of Hancock Park, a daughter of Roy Emerson Allen, who was renting 329 North McCadden Place, in the chapel of Immanuel Presbyterian on January 7, 1942. Clarke would return from the Pacific theater as a major in December 1945 a decorated veteran of Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. He was appointed as an assistant U.S. Attorney in September 1946 and in October 1947 as a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge. Governor Goodwin J. Knight—who after leaving office in 1959 would live at 540 South Arden Boulevard in Windsor Square—appointed Clarke as a Superior Court judge in February 1958. His brother, who had remained in private practice, would be appointed as a Superior Court judge in October 1959 by Governor Pat Brown. He and Mrs. Stephens had two daughters, Virginia, born on April 4, 1943, and Marylee, born a year later on May 18. The sisters would both be graduated from Marlborough and U.S.C. Clarke and Elizabeth, who lived at 232 South June for a time before moving to Los Feliz, had four children, Elizabeth Jr., born August 6, 1944, and twins Marie Carol and Allen Clarke, born on July 17, 1946, and Albert Lee Stephens III, born on December 28, 1949
  • Marie Clarke Stephens died at California Hospital on February 10, 1951, a month shy of her 65th birthday, following an operation (her daughter-in-law's father, Dr. Harvey G. McNeill, was then chief of staff of the institution). After his mother's death, Albert Jr. moved his family from their bungalow at 115 South Ardmore Avenue to live with his father at 232 South June Street. Judge Stephens Sr. was 82 when he decided to marry his legal secretary and law clerk since 1948, the Texas-born divorcée Mrs. Frances Vaughan Conklin, age 54, on December 22, 1956. The bride had attended Southwestern Law School. The ceremony took place in Wilmington, Delaware, with the judge's friend Judge John Biggs Jr., officiating. (John Biggs Jr. had been the roommate of F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton and, remaining loyal to the author through his decline, became executor of his estate and legal guardian of his daughter Scottie Fitzgerald.) The newlyweds moved north to Hillsborough. Judge Stephens, who would retire from the Ninth Circuit bench in 1961, died at Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame on January 15, 1965, ten days shy of his 91st birthday
  • A gathering of the extended Stephens family was featured in a charming article in the Times's Family section on November 22, 1959. Judge Stephens Sr. was quoted as saying "I never trained the boys to become judges. In fact, I don't think I trained them at all, except to respect truth and honesty and right." The reporter noted that Albert and Clarke laughed their disagreement, Albert insisting that law was in the very air of 232 South June Street, with their father conceding that "being judges just runs in the family" and remembering that his own brother Jess E. Stephens had been a Los Angeles Superior Court judge for many years
  • On the morning of August 25, 1960, Judge Albert Stephens Jr. and his next-door neighbor, real estate man Roger De Young of 214 South June Street, both awakened by noise outside, confronted a prowler at the point of two guns and held him until police arrived. The 31-year-old ex-convict was a suspect in a dozen robberies in the Wilshire District. As reported in the Citizen-News, police lieutenant Tom Bradley—Los Angeles's future mayor—said that "the suspect confessed he looted homes of cameras, jewelry, cash and other belongings during the last month." Hancock Park has had a history of such crime from its earliest days, through its lean years and into its 21st-century era of multi-million-dollar house valuations
  • On August 20, 1961, Judge Albert Stephens Jr. broke his left arm after a fall from a ladder while erecting a rose trellis; in an era of reportage of even minor local events, the Times saw the event as newsworthy
  • Virginia Stephens was married to Bing Stevens Newton, who was attending Los Angeles Valley College, at home at 232 South June Street in August 1966. Marylee Stephens married Tommy Hanlon Thomason, who was attending Harvard Business School back east, in the garden of 232 in September 1971; her uncle Judge Clarke Stephens officiated
  • Judge Albert Stephens Sr.'s family would retain possession of 232 South June Street for over 80 years. Among the alterations made to the house during their tenure, permits issued by the Department of Building and Safety called for termite repairs (April 30, 1947); interior alterations, the extension of an east-side bedroom, the addition of a dormer window over the open deck of a north bedroom, and the conversion of a dressing room into a bath (March 6, 1951); unspecified interior alterations (May 10, 1956); kitchen alterations (November 28, 1961); and the addition of a 26-by-42-foot recreation room over the garage with storage and laundry areas and a half bath added to the first floor (February 3, 1995)  
  • Albert Lee Stephens Jr. was 88 when he died on vacation up in Mammoth Lakes on September 6, 2001. The last of Stephenses to own 232 South June was his widow, Barbara McNeil Stephens, who died on February 10, 2012. The property was on the market by June 2012 asking $1,995,000
  • A new owner added a 90-foot-long, six-foot high block wall to the south side of the property in 2015 and a 20-by-40-foot swimming pool in 2016
  • 232 South June Street sold for $3,660,000 on May 20, 2021 



Illustrations: Private Collection; Judd Gunderson/LAT